AWWA Sky Whale Concept Plane

Oscar Viñals’ amazing concept design for the Sky Whale plane emerged earlier this week. Featuring hybrid wing body architecture that gives it its flattened shape, the plane is designed to reduce drag and therefore use less fuel.

Weaved Tent Shelters

These stunning structures are tent shelters designed by Abeer Seikaly. A winner of the Lexus Design Award, the shelters are designed for use in the aftermath of natural disasters and use an innovative weaving method to provide their beautiful shape.

Flavours Orchard Green Living

Designed by Vincent Callebaut Architects, who previously brought us the now infamous lilypad city, this concept community is designed for Kunming, China. The concept combines communal growing, renewable energy and stunning living spaces into one incredible space.

Cone

Residential Towers

What you are seeing here is an architectural visualisation of residential towers in Gurgaon, India. Developed by 3D rendering pros Pyxid Studio and designed by Upton-Hansen Architects, the towers are typical of some of the futuristic designs we’re seeing coming out of the subcontinent.

Not yet ‘Back to the Future’

We’ve been waiting since 1989 when ‘Back to the Future Part II’ teased us with the Marty McFly zooming around on a hover board and this week (for a very brief moment) it looked like we were going to see the first one become a reality. It was certainly the one story from this week that we, and everyone else, wanted to be true but sadly wasn’t. All it turned out to be was a very clever viral marketing scheme from the company HUVr. The wait for the hover board continues.

Social media takes to the skies

Facebook are heavily rumoured to be in talks to take over Titan Aerospace the maker solar-powered drones. The deal, if it goes ahead, is set to be in the region of $US60m. For Facebook their potential use for the drones could be part of the Internet.org movement which is aiming to bring free internet to developing countries. In theory the movement could use the solar-powered devices to serve as airborne wireless access points.

Turn your hand into a virtual keyboard

Samsung want to turn your hand into a virtual keyboard when you’re using its much rumoured smart glasses. The patent, which has only just surfaced and is from August last year, shows the hands being able to be used as a full ‘qwerty’ keyboard or an old style mobile phone ‘abc’ keyboard. The patent, if implemented, will make it easier to send private messages when using Samsung’s glass technology.

The internet will fail

The year was 1995, the website was Newsweek, and the author was Clifford Stoll. His, now foolish, claim was that the internet was going to struggle. He boldly claimed that “no online database will replace your daily newspaper” and that internet shopping would never take off. To be fair Google didn’t exist at the time and the juggernaut that is the MailOnline was unimaginable.

Drones at sea

Unmanned aerial vehicles are getting about all over the place and the Dolphin Safari has used one to film tens of dolphins and whales gathered together off the Californian coast. The animals can be seen frolicking around in groups and diving in and out of the water in the glorious weather.

Getty-ing free pictures

Getty Images has made all of its stock photographs free for users. Just like the image above anyone is now able to embed the photos from the agency. The move has been a blessing for small blogs with low budgets but may prove to be a hindrance to the incomes of freelance photographers who get paid on each use of their photos.

To infinity and beyond

Nasa have announced that they’ve discovered 715 new planets, which is the biggest amount unveiled in one go. Before the unveiling this week there were 1,000 planets which had been identified. The planets, which orbit 305 different stars, were discovered by the Kepler space telescope which has been in space for five year.